The bunker turned out to be worse than it sounded.
As he came at last through the trees and the dark rain, Kane found himself staring at a squat, instacrete structure. Caught in the white glare of the Warthog's headlights, it almost looked like a tick, hunkered down, head buried in the earth, leeching off the land itself. Goll stood just inside the entrance, which was nothing more than an empty square cut into the instacrete. Kane jogged up to join him, getting in out of the rain.
"You got a cig on you, Kane?" Goll asked.
Kane hesitated, then nodded. "Yeah. Found a pack."
"Spare one? I could use a goddamned smoke break," Goll replied.
"Uh, sure." He opened up his visor, then fished the pack and the Zippo out of his pocket, tapped two out, passed one to Goll.
"I never found out where you got that lighter from," Goll said around the cigarette after Kane had lit up. He lit his own, snapped it shut, and passed it to Goll.
"Had it custom-made when I became an ODST," Kane replied. "Figured, 'why not?' Cost about a hundred credits, but it's a really nice piece of work."
"It is," Goll agreed, holding it up, studying it intently. He passed it back and took a long pull on his cig as Kane pocketed it. "So...you and Hendrix," he said.
"What about us?" Kane replied, wondering where this was coming from.
"You two are together."
"Maybe. Diaz and Thompson were together."
"Don't worry, I'm obviously not going to throw the book at you. I don't give a shit." He frowned, fell into thought for a moment. "My father was a police officer, on Earth," he said. "He told me a lot of things, but something that really stuck was, 'You need to know when to apply the law, and when to apply common sense.' If I thought either you or Hendrix couldn't handle the relationship, I'd've thrown the book at you. I'm not an asshole, but I am a hardass. And with good reason. Same with Diaz and Thompson."
"I'm not sure it worked out too well for her," Kane muttered.
Goll's frown deepened. "Yeah. But she was...a little unstable. She'd been reprimanded before for rash actions. I think she would've done that for any of us." He shrugged. "Staring down the barrel of extinction, you don't really get to pick and choose who you get fighting beside you. We need all hands on deck for this war."
"Yeah," Kane said quietly, taking another long pull on his own Yeheyuan.
"And then there's this," Goll muttered, gesturing back into the dim interior of the bunker. "This whole damned mess. How are we going to explain any of this? Did ONI expect this? Did anyone expect this crap?" He shook his head. "God, I'm tired." He finished off his cigarette, dropped it, and crushed it under his boot. "Let's get this over with."
"Seems we've been saying that a lot lately," Kane replied, doing the same. He lowered his visor and readjusted his grip on his shotgun.
"Yep."
The pair of ODSTs steeled themselves as they moved deeper into the bunker. The first minutes went by with a painful lethargy, apprehension and anxiety filling every room. They stuck together, moving slowly and cautiously through the derelict structure. There was hardly anything left, and it was difficult to determine what each room might have once been. Mostly they were just empty, dusty rooms of shadows and cobwebs. He wondered what had happened here, why it had been abandoned. It felt like an evil place.
Like something terrible had happened here.
Maybe that's why the Proxies were here. Maybe they were drawn to it. It was a good place for an ambush, since it was freaking him out. But they cleared the entire first floor and found nothing. The pair of them ended up at a descending stairwell. It was even darker down there. They would be underground, with no light sources but their own. With Proxies. Kane could feel his heart beginning to thump harder in his chest, but made himself relax. Or tried to. He was having a particularly difficult time with that right now.
They moved silently down the blackened stairwell, Kane leading with the way with the shotgun tucked tight against his shoulder, flashlight on, Goll watching their back. They hit the next floor and saw that it descended further still. Kane looked briefly down that next midnight stairwell and then led the way into the first of the subterranean floors. Both men kept silent, listening intently as they moved with military precision through the tomb-like environment. More dust-filled rooms, a few battered foldout tables and chairs, a handful of long-empty crates. Although Kane began to smell something as they moved through the rooms.
It was strong, acrid, very familiar.
Fuel. Old school liquid fuel. The scent was faint, but it had to be somewhere else in the bunker, probably lower. It must have gotten left behind, he figured as they pressed on. But this floor was just as vacant as the first one. So they headed deeper. Kane led the way again, moving down the next flight of stairs, and found that at least they terminated here, going no deeper. Kane tightened his grip on the shotgun, slipping his finger over the trigger. The Proxies had to be here. Waiting for them. Lurking in the darkness.
He stepped into the entryway of the final floor, playing his light across the bare instacrete walls. Door to the left and one to the right, also empty rectangles cut into the walls. They checked out the right room, finding a dead end, and moved over to the left doorway. It led to a larger corridor that extended off to the right. There were several more open doorways cut into the walls, moving towards the end of the passageway, where the only doors he'd seen so far in the whole building stood. And they were closed firmly.
"Has to be where they are," Kane muttered.
"More than likely, but they might be counting on us to think that. We'll check every room on the way there. Quick and quiet," Goll replied.
The adrenaline started to pound as they split up, each taking a side of the hallway. Kane peered into the first room, found nothing, and moved on. The seconds ticked by in tense silence, his flashlight's beam continuing to reveal more empty rooms. The fuel smell was getting stronger, and became overwhelming when he finally located its source. One of the rooms was home to a good twenty or so barrels of the stuff.
There was another room beyond it. Switching to his personal air supply, as the chemical reek was overwhelming, (he saw that at least two barrels were leaking), Kane moved through the room and checked out the single doorway at the back. Another empty room. He moved back to the hallway and helped Goll clear out the rest of the rooms. There was nothing and no one waiting for them. The pair came to stand at the end of the corridor.
"Grenades," Goll said.
Kane had just two left. He grabbed one of the fragmentation grenades and primed it as Goll did the same and opened the door. Both of them threw their grenades in and Goll hit the close button. The doors, which split down the middle to open, began to close again. Each man backed up against the wall to either side of the door, guns aimed and ready, and the whole area shook as twin explosions ruptured the room beyond.
Amid all that fiery, metal chaos, Kane felt a black bolt of frozen fear shoot through him as he saw two hands, clad in black armor, shoot through the opening in the door before it could finish closing, and begin to force it back open with brute strength.
"Oh crap," Goll muttered as they began backing away.
The doors were forced open and, wreathed in smoke and back-lit by fire, a horrifying visage of a familiar figure stepped out.
That nine-foot Elite was standing before them, no, towering over them, its eyes not just black but somehow glowing black, a strange, hideous dead light staring out at them. Faster than either of them could follow, it reached out and snatched up Goll by the neck. Kane opened fire, but the huge Elite backhanded him with a casual ease and he was sent flying. He flew back several feet, hit the floor, and heard metal scraping as his momentum carried him several more feet. As he came to a stop, preparing to get up, he realized he was too late.
The giant Elite reached up, wrapped its hand around Goll's helmet, squeezed and pulled. The man didn't even get a chance to scream. A visceral torrent of blood sprayed the Elite, the Elites behind it that he now saw in the glare of his shotgun's flashlight, which was flickering madly, having landed some feet away. All of it horrifically shining in the flickering light. The enormous Elite Proxy dropped Goll's body and took a step towards him. Impossible fear filled him, because he was staring at death, at living death, coming straight for him, but on the heels of that came an idea, thrown together in a second.
Kane jumped to his feet and was off and running back down the corridor. The lead Elite Proxy roared, the sound echoing down the passageway and rattling his bones, and as he reached the door he was looking for, he spun around. God, all six of them were here and coming for him. This was going to have to be fast, and timed just right. The huge Elite Proxy was coming for him, sprinting down the corridor, roaring furiously. The others were close behind. Kane waited until the last second, then dashed into the fuel storage room.
He grabbed his final grenade, primed it, and, looking once over his shoulder and seeing the Elite Proxies into the room, dropped it, ran through the door at the back and threw himself out of the way. Hopefully, he wouldn't die-
The world went red.
Then the world went black.
* * * * *
"Kane...zzt...please, I'm...zzt...ed some backup!"
"Lara..."
Kane opened his eyes. Something was wrong with his vision...no, not his vision. His visor. It was cracked, in several places. His HUD was flickering badly. He couldn't hear anything, save for a broken transmission.
Lara.
He sat up, then groaned. His entire body felt like a deep contusion. Looking down, he saw that his armor was cracked in several places as well, and pieces of it had been blown off. He looked around and saw a soot-covered corridor. How long had he been out? His radio crackled again. "Kane, are you...zzt...hink it might be...zzt..."
"Lara, I'm here," Kane said. "Lara, can you hear me?!"
Nothing. He must be too far underground, or maybe his radio was broken. Either way, he needed to get up and move right now. Kane took a stumbling step forward, grunting as he fell against the wall, shoved himself upright and kept going. He stepped into the next room, where the fuel and the Elite Proxies had been, and saw...nothing but a lot more soot and charred pieces of what had been half a dozen Elite Proxies.
Well, if any of them had survived, he'd be dead now. He heard a soft hissing sound and it came to him, after a moment, what it was: his suit. Its atmospheric seal had been broken, and his personal air supply was still on. He'd forgotten to turn it off. It had probably saved him from suffocation. He switched it off, opened back up his vents.
The scent of fried flesh and burned meat filled his nostrils.
Kane limped through the room, almost fell out into the corridor, looked left, then right...his eyes fell on Goll's corpse.
"God," he whispered, then quickly limped over. He knelt, began patting the body down, taking everything he found. He finished the job by grabbing his dogtags. "I'm sorry," he said quietly, standing up and staring down one more time at the body. Well, without a head there was no way Goll would be coming back as a Proxy at least.
Kane suddenly felt his last meal coming up and fought to keep it down. God, just him and Lara now. Lara...
He turned limp-ran down the corridor, pausing to grab his shotgun and Goll's discarded SMG, and grunted, fighting agony as he hurried up the dark stairwell. It seemed to take forever, but he finally managed to come back out of the bunker.
"Lara! Can you hear me?!"
"Kane! What happened?! Nevermind, I need backup. I think they're coming for me. A Proxy got into the base. I killed it, but the signals are getting closer."
"I'm coming," Kane said, hauling himself into the Warthog and punching it. "Stay safe. It's just the two of us now."
"What? What happened to Goll?" she asked.
"He didn't make it. Big Elite Proxy bastard took him down."
"I'm sorry."
"Me too. Stay safe."
"Okay."
He drove on, pushing the Warthog as hard as he could.
* * * * *
Kane managed to make it through the woods in what he thought of as record time, and yet he still felt every excruciating second. He told himself it was going to be okay, Lara was a more than capable fighter, not just an ODST but a badass one at that. But he just didn't believe it. They'd all been capable fighters, every single one of them, and still he and Lara were the only ones left. Everyone else in the entire region was dead.
He could still see Goll's headless corpse lying there in a pool of blood.
Trying to ignore that thought, ignore all the horrifying worry threatening to overwhelm him, Kane focused on just getting to the outpost. He came around the final curve in the road he'd found and the military outpost came into view. He also saw a pair of dark figures, both of them Elite-sized, heading for the entrance, and he gunned it. Kane grinned grimly as there was one hard thump, followed by another, and both of the inhuman bastards went flying. He slammed on the brakes after passing through the front gate and hopped out.
He grunted in pain as he landed on his bad leg, (the blast must have done something to his right knee, it hurt like hell), but kept going, SMG in hand. One of the Elite Proxies was stirring. He walked up, stuck his boot on its neck, and fired a burst into its head. He did the same to the other one, just to be sure, then started running into the base.
"Lara, I'm here! What's your status?!" He paused, listening. Nothing. "Lara?!" Still nothing. Fighting panic, he rushed through the outpost, boots echoing hollowly as he ran on. He came into the corridor he needed and saw another Proxy corpse half-in and half-out of the door leading to the command room.
"Lara?" he called, hurrying.
"Ash?"
There was something strange in her voice, some kind of almost wondrous terror. Kane stumbled into the control room, and froze.
Lara was standing in the middle of the room, facing away from him, looking up.
At the Slender Man.
"Lara," he whispered.
She looked over her shoulder at him, her face white with fear, eyes wide. "Ash-" she began, and then the Slender Man reached out, grabbed her, and they were both gone.
Kane was alone in the control room.
He might as well have been alone on the whole planet.